December 14, 2013

Gay Peter Pan-ism and being slaves to fashion

How does being a slave to fashion fit into the framework of male homosexuals being stunted in childhood? ("Ewwww, girls are so yucky.") Most second graders don't read fashion magazines or regularly go out to clothing stores to see what's in this week. However, they are mindful of how everyone else looks -- whether they'll fit in or not -- and how the cool, older kids look -- whether they'll have to change the way they look in order to fit in, going forward.

A child has to be fairly open to changing the kind of tribal membership badges that he displays, given that he's just starting off in the slow, gradual process of enculturation. He doesn't know exactly what range of colors, patterns, proportions, etc., are normal in his cultural group. Nor does he know what range of hairstyles is acceptable, what musical genres, what slang words, and so on.

That process seems to harden during adolescence and young adulthood, when people are the most sociable and anxious to fit in with their peers. Once that's done, they're a member of a cultural group, having absorbed both the enduring aspects of their cultural lineage, as well as the particular traits of their generation.

Like it or not, they'll always have soft spot for at least some of the pop culture trends from their childhood and adolescent years. This allows for nostalgia in adulthood, perhaps reaching the level of a revival movement, however limited in scope within the broader society. For example, the early '90s revival of the past several years, primarily at Urban Outfitters but probably also in places catering to like-minded (and like-aged) customers.

If the "gay germ" arrests psychological maturation in the elementary school years, then their minds might never congeal around a particular set of generational traits. They're permanently stuck in the stage of looking around to see what everybody else is doing this year, and how they have to alter their existing set of cultural markers in order to fit in with this new state of affairs. If you never grow up, you never belong for good, so you struggle to belong for this year, at least.

Hence, why gays all tend to look the same no matter what generation they ought to belong to. They're all desperate to fit in with right now. And hence why they tend not to be bold trend-starters but annoying copycats playing catch-up.

It's striking how little nostalgia queers feel, and how minimal their participation is in the whole "vintage" phenomenon. I've mentioned before that the most faggot-free event you can rely on is '80s night -- "omigosh seriously? the '80s were like so however-many years ago!" It's like connecting with the past, however briefly, causes them physical pain. They don't use slang from when they were growing up, ironically or not, nor make pop culture references to things more than five years old (except to disparage them for being so old). They failed to fit in with their peers all those years ago, and now they've moved on to trying and failing to fit in with what's cool right now.

Some of them have a slight interest in mid-century retro, but that's only because Fifties pop culture looks and sounds so gay and kiddie. It's doesn't feel that exotic to their existing sensibilities, the way that the Seventies or Eighties would feel to a college girl these days.

And then there's the minor tendency for them to try to live in an era way before they were even born, another signal that they never fit in growing up. Some geeky-goony types do this too -- but then they were total misfits too. Normal people who take an interest in the past nevertheless show signs of having been enculturated by the time they were 20. With gays and geeks, it's more a form of escapism into a world where no-longer-living peers cannot reject them, and so where their cultural membership is approved in the absence of existing members speaking up against their inclusion.

It's also striking how gays don't appear to play the fashion game in order to boost their sense of superiority in the greater status competition. That's a uniquely adult way of approaching fashion, in the broad sense of signalling how au courant your tastes are. Gays aren't so much striving to climb one rung higher on the ladder, as they are struggling to keep their head above water when it comes to fitting in with a cultural group.

Sure, there are a handful of haughty homos who ape snobs, but in general they look more like stressed-out children rushing around the department store with their surrogate big sisters, the fag hags, uncertain of whether this or that shirt will make them fit in with or stand out against their peers. You always seem them with that neurotic "Be honest, what do you thinnnnk?!?!?!" look on their face, which you don't see among grown-up status strivers who are inspecting the selection.

What predictions does this view make? Perhaps homosexuals would be able to learn foreign languages more easily, controlling for IQ. What language you speak is one of the strongest markers of what cultural group you belong to. On IQ tests, they might also show higher crystallized intelligence scores than fluid intelligence. Crystallized intelligence is the things you pick up from experience, such as vocabulary words, whereas fluid intelligence is on-the-fly reasoning or working memory. Gay brains don't seem to crystallize as much or as fast, although I'm not sure if that's specific to the cognitive part of enculturation, or if it extends to pure intelligence as well. Worth looking into, and it wouldn't even be that politically incorrect to find one set of results or another.

7 comments:

I guess that correlates with Openness to New Experiences. In line with gays' lack of a disgust reflex.

Though, openness to new experiences, and the ability to learn languages, doesn't always indicate Peter Pan syndrome. For instance, diplomats would have an enhanced ability to learn languages, but would also be more discrete than the general population.

Lack of a disgust relfex, lack of crystallized intelligence, and openness to new experiences are probably all linked together. These traits are probably also what - *on average* - differentiate liberals from conservatives. Lots of heterosexual liberals lack the disgust reflex.

It's strange how puny of a fact base liberals have to draw on... you'd think for people who are so open to new experiences, they'd actually have a variety of experiences. They seem pretty insulated, though.

Perhaps there's a distinction to be drawn between openness to new vs. different experiences. They like leveling up their lib cred (accumulating new but similar experiences), but not in exposing themselves to shocking, exotic, or otherwise unfamiliar experiences (exotic from their POV).

I haven't read psychometrics in about 6 years, but I wonder if they quantify this difference -- breadth vs. depth of crystallized intelligence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openness_to_experience - "Openness is moderately associated with crystallized intelligence, but only weakly with fluid intelligence.[18][19] A study examining the facets of openness found that the Ideas and Actions facets had modest positive correlations with fluid intelligence (r=.20 and r=.07 respectively)." Although some break it down into intellect and emotional/aesthetic facets, of which liberalism is linked only to emotional/aesthetic, and where intellect does have fluid g correlations.

I think Liberals probably know more about everything all considered, they just have the wrong facts about some specific things, because they are emotionally/aesthetically motivated on them.

"Crystallized intelligence" seems simply a different name for "general knowledge".

"how puny of a fact base liberals have to draw on... you'd think for people who are so open to new experiences, they'd actually have a variety of experiences. They seem pretty insulated, though.

Perhaps there's a distinction to be drawn between openness to new vs. different experiences. They like leveling up their lib cred (accumulating new but similar experiences), but not in exposing themselves to shocking, exotic, or otherwise unfamiliar experiences (exotic from their POV)."

I think the problem is in the name "Openness to Experience", who can convey the wrong impression - this factor is not really about liking to have new experiences (this is more covert by the "Extraversion" factor); looking to many of the questions that in tests are supposed to measure "Oppenness", seems to be more about "intellectual curiosity"

I think the problem is in the name "Openness to Experience", who can convey the wrong impression - this factor is not really about liking to have new experiences (this is more covert by the "Extraversion" factor); looking to many of the questions that in tests are supposed to measure "Openness", seems to be more about "intellectual curiosity"

A lot of them are about art galleries and so on - it's not exactly intellectual, but intellectual / artistic / novelty.

However, it's probably correct that Openness doesn't predict new experiences that much. I'm sure Openness contributes but...having new life experiences will also take

- Extraversion to go out and have them (rather than stay in your room because new experiences are exhausting)

- Emotional Stability to avoid fear that can inhibit entering and exploring new situations

- and relatively low levels of at least the order facet of Conscientiousness in order to have spontaneity.

There's also a correlation with creativity and low levels of the trait Honesty/Humility, whereby individuals with low levels of Honesty/Humility seem to be more creative, either through breaking the rules of what can be thought about and done more often, or through talking about and self promoting their "creative" ideas.

(Honesty/Humility from the HEXACO model is kind of an inverse version of Eysenckian psychoticism, but IIRC fits a normal distribution better, and is less "general", leaving more to Agreeableness, Openness and Conscientiousness).

Liberals don't differ much from Cons on any of these traits.

They differ on Conscientiousness to an extent, but the differences on spontaneity specifically aren't large, Honesty/Humility has some connection with a left wing "fairness" as opposed to right wing social dominance orientation but this isn't strong.

So I would expect their levels of new experiences and actual levels of breaking the orthodoxy of thought to lag behind their general increase in knowledge.

The result is then that Liberals are probably similar to Conservatives in diversity (depth and breath) of real world experience, but have much more " book larnin' ".

Which is not necessarily good when the books tell you the wrong thing and real life experience has to check it (as agnostic has told us in this blog at length, in one form or another).